It’s quite challenging being somewhere without set hours where they tell you to ‘just work whenever you want’ as you are unsure whether you are working harder than you need to or not hard enough… on the basis that neither of us are particularly work shy and everywhere we have been hosts have seemed pleased with what we have done we have worked at our usual pace and were tonight told ‘well you’ve already done everything we had planned for you!’ with a laugh 😆
After Ady fretting about sleeping in the straw bale house he and the kids were out like lights last night leaving me the one struggling to sleep. I couldn’t really pinpoint why as I was not cold, uncomfortable, worried, hungry or any other reasonable reason so eventually decided it must be that I needed a wee so got up to do that after lying there for ages. When I got back into bed I checked the time at just aftere 230am and then finally did fall asleep so was most reluctant to wake with the alarm at 8am! In the end I sent Ady off and told him to come back for me in ten minutes. He woke me at 9am and I woke the kids – as 10am seems a perfectly acceptable start time for us here we will stick with that and I won’t stress about getting up early tomorrow either.
We breakfasted and then offered to get on with the mowing / strimming again and have actually finished the whole lawn today with Ady strimming and me mowing. The first really hard days work in a while and I’d be lying if I said I enjoyed every moment and didn’t spend time deciding how much I’d charge for mowing per hour if it was my real job. I also took a slightly irrational dislike to the mower which was tempremental (another tool that really isn’t up to the job we are asking it to do – why do so many hosts have that?) and at one point caught myself sticking two fingers up at it when it finally started after being a real pig. I have callouses on both hands and a very sore hand from pulling that bloody starter string, not as hard as Ady pulled it this morning though when he sauntered over to patronise me struggling to start it and yanked it so hard it snapped! 😆
We had morning and afternoon tea breaks and lunch with Andy as everyone else was out for most of the day. Davies and Scarlett have done some chatting to various people here, some watching films, some playing with lego and lots of crazy dare devil go karting up and down the hills. This evening we had a lovely time chatting to everyone particularly Andy and Ruth who travelled round the world with their two daughters for over a year when they were just 1 and 3, sharing stories, recounting adventures and discussing the highs and lows. We also talked about fostering, caring for disabled children and general life story swapping. All interesting stuff.
I think we will learn very little in the way of new skills from our WWOOFing tasks here but lots from spending time in the company of these people.